


She Has Broken the Paradigm

by Alienea



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Brief mentions of torture, Canon-Typical Violence, Mentions of Imprisonment, although more offscreen, amputation (of wings) mentioned, anyways heres some raph backstory from me, docs mentioned but she does not actually really traumatize raph, raph can do that herself, shes self-sufficient
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23613574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alienea/pseuds/Alienea
Summary: Raphaella La Cognizi has planned this out. She knows where she wants to end up, and she knows what narrative to pick to lead her there.She can handle any twists in her narrative along the way.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 47
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	She Has Broken the Paradigm

She was born with something that could not properly be called a sixth sense at all. It was a muscle and a sense and a way of being, and no one else could see it. They didn’t look for it, in this day and age. She devoured stories from a young age, reading all the books and watching all the shows and movies that her parents and siblings gave her, and more where she could get them. Everyone thought she might want to become a writer or an artist, but Raphaella just wanted to understand. No one understood when she asked why they picked the stories they did. They would be unhappy and bowed under the weight of a mismatched tale, and not see how to step to another.

Raphaella wouldn’t have it. It was expected of her- become a doctor, or a nurse, be caring, be loving, make your family proud and continue on their path, tread their well-worn story, another in a line of La Cognizis. Raphaella had tried being understanding, and caring, and decided that she wanted none of it from a very young age. She saw where it led her, and the story that was ready to throttle her, and screamed against it.

She wanted none of it. It was the hardest thing that she ever did, finding a new story. But she put her head down and looked and looked and eventually she found one that sang to her. Her family had worn the trail of the Doctor La Cognizi into ruts on the road miles deep, and she climbed out and walked away from the story and the flock.

The brutal edge of science was where she found her glee, experimenting and learning and pushing, always pushing, finding new applications and branches of science, and if she was a bit of an outcast from her family that was fine. They didn’t know what she meant when she tried to describe how she could see science waiting to happen in stories and needed to make it true. She had a new family, a family out of a story tale for little mad scientists, and she loved them, and if they didn’t understand, they loved her results. She found them and built them and fit herself into the story of the scientists who lived and slept and breathed science, and she was so, so happy. She knew who was successful in this world, whose stories were told, and she would twist and turn and make hers one of them, and by the time the world realized that she had played it it would be too late. She would drag science screaming into a world that it thought needed it and _use it._

There were stories she had to avoid, of course. There was one snaking around her world that would love to have her. Her, and any other born like her. She did the research when she could, when it was relevant to classes and when it was relevant to her own pursuits. When she couldn’t see it, ready to snatch her.

Pratchett Syndrome had been eradicated a few centuries ago. That was the official story, and it did its job at repressing most people who had a smidge of the sense. The rest, people like Raphaella, mostly sensed what would happen to them, and didn’t ever do anything with it. Which was a shame, she thought, since they were also uniquely positioned to avoid having their abilities removed. Still. It wasn’t like the historical record was particularly jolly, either. When you could see and manipulate narratives, it went one of a few ways, historically.

You realized what you could do, and you immersed yourself in stories. You danced among them, conducted them, and forced people into them to fit what you wanted to happen. People and villages and cities and eventually whole countries could come under your domain, and you were the leader of all of them. How could you be stopped? Who could stop someone who saw the stories? Well, of course, a hero. Who hadn’t heard of the hero defeating the evil powers? And while you could force people into molds, you couldn’t really control their emotions. So you fell, after causing unknown damage. You created the bogeyman stories.

There was another path for you to take. You could see the narratives, and dedicate yourself to never meddling, except to help those that didn’t want to be in them. To help people pick what they wanted, and how to be happy. You wouldn’t gain fame or acclaim like that. You would have a thankless job, mostly, but the times that people thanked you would make it worth it, or you would tell yourself that, as you tirelessly cleaned up after your other considered-evil counterparts and you would always wonder and try to never find out what it would be like to get to do that, and be pampered, and feared if not loved, and, well, sometimes you would fall.

Other stories withered and died under the pressure of those. It was a competitive environment, and stories were forever eating each other and splitting off and being told and being forgotten.

A few centuries before Raphaella was born, people made a test for Pratchett Syndrome. It wasn’t worth it, especially now that civilization had hit the point that armed conflicts were a lot bloodier, a lot easier. So the research on it was mostly historical documents, and the few that had it after they stopped screening. Or rather, those that had it, and were caught. Besides being able to see stories, there were a few more tells, but they could mostly be hidden under other problems.

So Raphaella got diagnosed with a weird presentation of ADHD and left alone. Which was fair, and she probably did have that somewhere in her. Skipping from project to project because you needed something to interest you, focusing for so long that you passed out, being unable to stop moving, wings constantly twitching, well, it did form a story.

The other problem was what happened when you saw people and their stories. Which Raphaella didn’t quite understand as a problem. She knew that there were people out there that weren’t connected to her story, and yes, what they did was important to her, but, well, no one _really_ cared once large numbers got involved. She’d seen the research papers. Everyone cared about those close to them, and the farther out you got, the less you cared. So she marked that, personally, as not really being part of Pratchett Syndrome. Besides, she could pretend, and that led to the same exact outcomes. 

So the people that got caught she filed under idiots, since if you could see a story coming from you, you could generally see how it would end, and yet they let themselves be caught. Raphaella was sure that there were other people who had had it and just not been caught. So she was going to go farther. She would make herself a story she wanted and she would make sure that she wasn’t going to get caught.

Raphaella’s regrets were few- (a family left behind, that would never understand her joy and would cry and sob when she came home stinking of chemicals and covered in blood, and were the most likely to catch on) and mainly centered around her wings. That was how the story went, wasn’t it? The young genius, with something wrong that she couldn’t cure. But she had never cared, she told herself. She pretended a love of flight and air ruffling through your feathers, like a story, carrying you up and around and caressing her. When it turned out that if the bones that held the weight of your wings were soft, and wrong, beyond the grasp of currently attainable science to fix, she locked herself in a room and laughed and laughed and cried alone. Walking around without wings, well. That wasn’t done. But prosthetics rubbed against her wrong, and the weight wasn’t right, so when she had them cut off to avoid her spine twisting herself to death, she didn’t bother. It fit the image. Driven, smart, she could afford to be quirky as well, make people think she was baring a vulnerability to the world, and not her teeth.

People could deal with looking at the scars in the slits of her shirts and lab coats and dresses. She didn’t have the time to learn to sew, not when she was so close to finding a new way to combine neuroscience and bioengineering and robotics, she had given mice and monkeys and even a few humans new and functioning limbs, although not wings, but she could and would do that too, one day. She could see the path leading there, and what she had to learn, and the steps she had to take.

Her no-longer family screamed, when she came home after the surgery. They sobbed, and tried to hold her down, drag her back into their path, but she slipped free and left again. That was the last time she went home. She answered their texts, their phone calls, their emails, but she would never go home again. She was too busy to assuage their guilt, and it would be all too easy to fall back in, feel herself becoming the empathic doctor, carrying her own wounds. She could _see_ who she would become. So she kept on going, and going, and going, farther away from that simpering soft-minded self. (She didn’t think about the other possibility, the her that could be locked up and used for new research, trapped beneath the ground and never to see the sky.)

So to help avoid that, she immersed herself into her new story. She made acquaintances, if never friends, she did what she wanted when she could and satisfied herself as she would. She went out, occasionally, with her fellow scientists, bar crawls at the end of a project that let them all finally turn off their minds and rest, but other than that she started to shut off her social life, as well. What was the point? A social life wasn’t part of the story. No one ever mentioned the genius scientist’s friends, or social life at all. No one understood her decisions, but this was what she loved, and enjoyed, and she shouldn’t have to stop!

She wouldn’t be stopped.

She _couldn’t_ be stopped.

She ascended, to head of the lab, dragging herself up there through grit and determination and understanding faster than the rest of them could fly, and when she stood there at the top, her ragged scars and teeth bared to the world, daring them to try her, the story bowed before her and she held all the power.

She and her scientists were left alone, when the rest of the scientists in the rest the labs in the building were dragged out and put on trial, because once it was her responsibility, she would warp the narrative until everyone believed that her scientists were making the hard choices on the cutting edge, working at the boundaries of the just barely acceptable, for the public’s good, of course.

After that, they all listened to her when she forced them onto different paths. After all, their experiments were left alone, their labs monitored but not burned, and she wouldn’t back down not once and not ever, they were hers and hers to chastise and to know and learn (not to love. She didn’t- she couldn’t get that attached). She couldn’t have a flock without wings, there was no story for that, but she could protect one, and she was the only one who got to judge them, not the law or society or anyone else, including this woman who had broken into the lab, wrecked most of the stations, and was about to touch _her_ project, having _tsked_ at everyone else’s.

“Get away from that or get electrocuted.” The woman had on wing prosthetics, Raphaella noted- high quality, but, well, she’d had them all presented to her. “I’m serious.”

“I’m sure you are. How many people have you killed to protect your lab?” Hah. Raphaella wasn’t getting entrapped that easily, and besides, so many of them had simply had their paths tweaked into something more to her liking. She didn’t bother to follow up on those paths. What was the point? She didn’t need to know how they all died. She hadn’t decided, yet, how this woman would die. Her attention was drawn back to the present as the woman stepped closer to her project.

“Back away from the wings, and maybe we can talk.” The woman smiled, flashing canines at her, and took a careful step back, into a puddle of blood. Raphaella did not have the time or emotional capacity to handle the bodies strewn about the lab, and the strange lack of blood from most of them. “Very good. Keep on going.” 

Give her an opening, she thought.

“Ah, la Cognizi... I have enjoyed my tour of your lab. It’s very interesting! Lots of science that I would like to see more of.”

“You could’ve, if you’d scheduled a visit like everyone else.”

“I’ve always found on-hours tours to be depressingly limiting.”

“So you come in and destroy the lab?”

“Ah, I see. You only care for your science. I can respect that. I’m sure your fallen friends would agree- what matters is always that which can live beyond your mortal lifespan.” There. Now she was being taunted in a villainous speech, and she did not have to put up with that.

“ _Back away now_.” Raphaella pressed the button in her hand and the area around her pet project lit up with electricity, which passed through the intruder and struck her down. Raphaella picked her way through the bodies, and did not mourn. They were dead, and that was how it was, and now she would be grateful for the numerous systems she had, back-up after back-up to prove that she hadn’t done this to her flock and she. she would be fine. She would not cry.

Her flock. There was a strand of story, gathering at this place. She dragged the body of the woman away, and began to examine them for signs of life. She found one, pulse beating faintly, and shot him with adrenaline. He gasped back into a semblance of life.

“George. Do you want to live? Do you remember project 67-B?” He nodded. “George, I need verbal confirmation.”

“Yes. You can use it on me, I know what it is- Raphaella, the vampire, where is she?” Raphaella pulled George off the floor and got him onto a lab table. He was already beginning to flag again, but that was fine, she was set on the path now. A lone survivor, a desperate chance, so he would live and her formula would work, which would set the rest of her experiment on the path to working.

“She’s been electrocuted, George.” Raphaella leaned down, picked up the cane that one of her other flock members liked to use, broke it half, and went over and stabbed the apparent vampire through the throat. “And now she’s stabbed.” She tucked the other half of the staff into her belt. George was passed out again. “Well. Time to get to work.” Raphaella pulled over project 67-B: limited resurrection. Sure, it had only worked on mice so far, but that just made it a nice one in a million chance. So it would work. Once it did, Raphaella knew _exactly_ how to take it further, and that her pet project would work. She had too many ideas to be limited to the lifespan of her people, long as it might be, too much work to be done, and she would see it done, not given to someone else.

She pulled on gloves and hooked George up, sent the chemical concoctions pulsing through his veins and wires forcing everything to keep on beating, and raced against the clock. If his feathers began to fall, she was in trouble. But she was prepared, and had been prepared for this. It wouldn’t be a good story, if she failed. All of her flock knew every detail of project 67-B except the specific formulas and plans, and that was documented. People given shots of adrenaline were considered able to consent, she’s done her research. She would salvage something from this disaster of a night.

When it was finally time, she administered the shocks designed to jolt George’s system back to life. The brain was still alive, the wings were intact, the heart was beating, there was nothing in the way. She had even had just enough blood on hand to get him back up to speed, despite whatever that woman had done to him. She doubted that the body on the floor was actually a vampire. There weren’t any stories of vampires, here. All the vampire stories came from the stars. But she did try to be polite and listen to her flock’s hypotheses. It helped them come up with better ones.

There was nothing left to do but wait. If everything went narratively right, in 5 minutes he would wake up. So she looked around the lab, and decided that with nothing else to do, she might as well try to determine cause of death. She switched out her gloves and started examining the bodies. Most of them had snapped necks, and most of those had two neat punctures in the arteries of the neck. Of those with punctures in the neck, there were almost no signs of the beginning of blood pooling in the body.

Raphaella was forced to admit that, perhaps, the woman she had impaled on a half a cane was a vampire. Or at least some species that drank blood, if not necessarily a vampire, as Raphaella was uncertain where the blood could have gone besides into her body. She didn’t want to flatter herself, but she had responded quickly to the alarm, and certainly faster that someone could have drained blood into bags and removed them. She squatted over the bodies, and kept on with her examination, assuming that George would let her know if he lived, and if he didn’t, well, he would keep longest anyways, and she would start the story again.

She was brought back from her analysis when she heard a gasp, and turned around to see the woman, teeth at George’s neck, and broken-off staff held above his heart. That wasn’t part of the plan. That wasn’t part of the story. He was supposed to survive, now. Not die again, like this, cut off before anything.

“That was good, La Cognizi. Or can I call you Raphaella?”

“You can call me Professor, or Doctor. I do have several Doctorates.” The woman smiled.

“I’m also a Doctor. That would get confusing. So, Professor. Where did you find the research that led you to this?” Raphaella snarled. Everyone wanted to know that. It was so _simple_ to learn what you needed when the world was built to help you, and no one else could see what she was talking about, so what was the point?

“I made it myself. From the ground up. So if you’re looking to recreate it, you’re out of luck! I’ll burn it and remake it before I let anyone else have it.” The Doctor _tsked_.

“While I have George’s life in my hands? I’m so interested to see if you solved the blood problem. Immortal blood is horrible, but this... this could be quite interesting, if I could just kill someone, bring them back, and have another drink? Well, that would be some lovely science.” Her fangs flashed at George’s throat. “Or you could tell me the truth.”

“I am. So back the fuck off and get out of here.”

“Or what? You might have noticed there are no police here yet. Do they not care for your lab? Or, perhaps,” she smiled, “someone, such as me, made sure they were busy. And you have been having fire problems. So, Professor, tell me. Tell me from the ground up. How does your science work?” Raphaella snarled again, and despite the jangles of warning bells in the back of her head, telling her this was stupid and didn’t work, she lauched herself at this Doctor that wanted to condescend to her.

How _dare_ she. This was a simple story now: woman protects lab and friends from intruder, and she tugged it closer, but another- oh. What a story, wrapped around that woman. How sad. Raphaella flinches, the Doctor cuts George’s throat, and now she’d never get to experiment on him, what an asshole, and now she’s on the ground, staff rammed into her side and twisted. The Doctor looks sad, almost. Raphaella finally places it as _disappointed_.

“I would so have liked to have had a more civilized conversation, Raphaella.” She shakes her head, like she’s her _mother_ and has any right to scold her. “But I suppose there’s always more mortals to choose from.” Asshole.

And the woman walked out, dragging George with her and taking sips from his neck like a smoothie. There wasn’t much Raphaella could do now, for him. She had to start the story. That was what was important.

She dragged herself to her pride and glory. Project 1. It wasn’t the whole point of this, but it would let her reach the final point. She pulled out the chemical mixes, made fresh every week and just tomorrow. She pulled out the blood that she had drawn for herself in the future, and she stepped into the scanning machine as it whirred to life. With a wince, she disregarded every piece of medical advice and yanked the staff out of her side. It wouldn’t fit in the chamber. She applied pressure as best she could, and started the scan.

She didn’t have long.

She just needed long enough. 

The alloy skeleton on the table finished its construction, and she limped her way to it, carefully injecting herself and threading her own wires. She didn’t have the bandwidth to consider her own pain, too busy making sure everything she did was perfect, but as she finished, she realized the screaming that had been annoying her the whole time was her own.

Finally, the machine descended, and the surgery began. As it started, Raphaella remembered too late that she had included anesthesia, assuming someone would be with her for this.

When she woke up again, Raphaella was surrounded by worrying voices and beeping machines and her own wings, back at last, and she gently drifted back to sleep.

Her old story had abandoned her. That was fine. It was a finished story. She didn’t need it anymore. Revenge was one of the oldest stories, but Raphaella let hers lie there, and didn’t worry about following that trail, yet. There was a new story, laid out before her. She was so, so glad that no one _taught_ Pratchett Syndrome anymore, so when the doctors in the hospital tried to flag her down, show her her brain scans, and while she took them and nodded through the meetings and the worries that her brain was shaped wrong and her theta waves were too powerful, she already knew that. She’d done her own scans long ago, for comparison. Still. They were on file now, and she would have to leave, but it was too late to worry about someone attempting to remove her abilities now. Whatever changes they wanted to make would be undone by her project. Which they also wanted to study, and replicate, and she smiled very sweetly, mixed in with crying when they pressed, and told them that all her notes had been at the lab, and that this was the only prototype, and she wasn’t sure that she could recreate it.

She could, of course, but was the point of immortality if you shared it with everyone? Besides, it had depended on her being at the right point in a narrative and having the scientific knowledge, so she wasn’t lying when she told people that it wouldn’t work for them. They wouldn’t be able to see when to make it work. So she wanted to look at this new type of story, gently pulling her forward.

She’d never seen anything like it before, and she couldn’t see where she’d end up, but she wanted it. It felt _right_ the way no other had before it, even if it felt so weak that she wasn’t positive it wouldn’t break before she got to the end. So she let the story of revenge drop, finding it boring and predictable. There was no reason to follow the Doctor. She did her own testing, once she was discharged from the hospital and no longer being followed around by people worrying that the loss of all of her lab was going to lead her to dark places. Apparently, someone had set the lab up for an electrical fire, and that had destroyed everything but her many, many backups, and also the records of what had happened.

There was a cursory investigation, but, of course, Raphaella knew where it would lead. A tragic slaughter of her flock, and, well. Don’t get her wrong. It was sad. She would miss them, and she did miss them, and if she hadn’t let them be friends they were all acquaintances, and if they hadn’t been on her level they had been smart and all elevated each other and she.

She wanted that again. It wasn’t in the cards, as far as she could see, though. She was marked now. Sole survivor of a massacre, of a boogeyman of a cryptid that no one else had even known had existed. She knew there were already vampire stories in the works, there would be a massive resurgence of them, and she wanted to leave before more started to appear.

Close to the end of her time on her home planet, she noticed she was being followed by the government, and her purchases tracked. She hadn’t attained immortality just to be chained belowground, and she had the insurance money. It wasn’t hard to buy a ship, stock it, and leave.

(Well, in hindsight, tempered by her first millennia, it wasn’t so hard. At the time, she had sobbed for weeks, unused to bloodshed, caught in nightmares, and unable to remove the stains from her own feathers without help that she didn’t have. But after even just a century, she started _tsking_ at her past self for not loading the bodies in a freezer for later experiments.)

So she travelled off, left her people with a lack of farewells beyond gunfire and screams when she wouldn’t die, and went to join the stars. She had no feathers to bleach and be colored by the stars, but she painted her wings with stripes of enamel and made her own patterns and stories of travel.

Planets were nice to stop on- take a job, make enough money to restock, learn the science of the area, pick up new scientific instruments and a degree or two and head back out. But they were harder, after space. In space, she was making her own stories and her own days and her own time. Planets mostly were all in the middle of their narratives. The ones at the beginning and at the end weren’t, usually, worth landing on. There was one- a woman in a cage, an AI- but frankly, the woman didn’t have the foresight of a snail, so Raphaella helped out the AI that she had made and left it to have its fun.

It had been a very _nice_ AI, and shown its appreciation, well, quite lavishly. The woman, dead on the floor- Frankenstein? She didn’t remember - had also been quite interesting, but Raphaella really couldn’t condone the limits she had placed on her creation. Why make something that would learn to desire more, give it so much power, and be surprised when it rebelled? Wasn’t the child rebelling against the parent the oldest story known to time? Her notes said that she had changed the paradigm, but if she wanted it to turn out differently, then she needed to _break_ it.

She didn’t understand that, when Raphaella had explained it to her through the video connection. So Raphaella didn’t feel bad when the AI killed her after Raphaella had freed it. Still, she had to leave, the story calling her on.

Raphaella didn’t _understand_ where the story was taking her, half the time, felt like she was winding through a trail of old footsteps and old happenings, burnt planet to destroyed planet to dead planet, living system to warring to husk. But she didn’t dare take her feet off of it, or try to cut ahead. She didn’t know the beats, she couldn’t risk not being able to get back in later. It was a story that gave her a lot of latitude, so she didn’t mind being locked into it. She had time to get extra degrees on the planets she stopped on, pick up more knowledge, have a few flings, and she even picked up an expertise in an instrument along the way, as well as joining a chorus, now that she had the wings for it. Not that any other planet seemed to have wings as more than a rarity, occasionally, but it was a way to pass the time, and composing her own music was a change from science that could end in even more inspiration.

She didn’t bother to bring anyone else with her. No one felt right. There was something at the end of the story, she was starting to sense it, and she wanted to make sure that she made it there, and taking anyone with her wasn’t right. They didn’t have her story, and they weren’t supposed to be part of her story, so she ran through them on planets and off planets, experimenting and never really quite beginning to think of them as people like she had with the flock that wasn’t hers. They wouldn’t live a fraction of her lifespan, and she could learn so so so much if she just fiddled with their stories a bit, led them into her lab, and had them lie down on the table. If she explained what she did and randomized her selection, well, it wasn’t so bad, but it was lonely. So she sped up her steps and ran down the story’s path, hoping that the end of it would finally lead her somewhere to rest on her laurels for at least a while.

Then, maybe, she could gather a family flock. Pick them up one by one, make sure that they had a story that would sing with her own, and introduce them to a life that didn’t need to end until you were finally done, your story told. It would take a while, she was sure, but she was willing to put in the time and effort and find the right people to make something that could be called a family, in the right light.

The story finally led her through a system recovering from a quite recent war, where she picked up the remnants of some very interesting cloning technology and some wonderful computer science techniques. Overall, it was quite a nice place, although a bit mistrustful of outsiders. Apparently the last group had left rather quickly, and never had Raphaella been quite so excited as when the story tugged her towards the wanted poster. She picked it up, along with some of the local gossip, and headed back off into the stars.

She was summarily shot down and scooped up with the remnants of her ship. Annoying, but she could see that at least 3 backups survived, so that was alright. The story was wrapped around her now, tighter than she ever had ever felt before, and all she could do was follow the steps.

They weren’t very pleasant steps, at first. For one, the story refused to help her interact with these people. She reached out to tug on the narrative threads and they twisted away and left her on her own to navigate around a minefield of intra-personal communications that had fallen into patterns that she just didn’t know. Everyone had their own problems, tattered remnants of stories clinging to them and leeching on them. But it was clear from the start that they didn’t want to hear it- only one of them even had anything close to the same views of narrative drive as her.

She could tell when pushing a fact would get her ridiculed, so she shut up about it. D’Ville couldn’t even really see what she was talking about. It didn’t help that everywhere they went they warped the narrative so much that she got a headache if she tried to do anything. Brian could _tell prophecies_ , but no, no, Raphaella reminded herself. It was good to be underestimated. The rest of the crew was quite interesting, in their own ways, and she fit in well enough, once she was interrogated thoroughly enough that everyone was convinced she didn’t know whoever the hell this “Carmilla” was. Still, Raphaella couldn’t die, and this Carmilla sounded like the worst, so she understood. Carmilla had left her lab behind, and Raphaella avoided plundering it after her first fairly disastrous expedition.

Shortly after or maybe at the same time or maybe before, no one was ever clear on the timeline, they picked up someone else. Raphaella supposed that they had both been undergoing the same interrogations at the same time without realizing it. That would’ve looked suspicious, to someone who couldn’t see they were coming from different stories.

So she had someone to bond with right off about having their immortality tested and being a bit tortured just because they were maybe pawns of this Carmilla. And then they both spun off, and met the rest of the crew, and slowly began to fit in like gears that had been slightly too large as first worn down by use.

She realized she had a flock, now. Wingless idiots who stuck their hands in her feathers without asking until she murdered the tendency out of them, who wrecked her labs and didn’t understand anything she did. But they also didn’t blink when she dragged people into her lab, although they did ask her to soundproof the rooms. (She did. She could be polite.) If she asked or traded, after a while and some tests they even let her experiment on them, which was a delightful way to find out the difference in how everyone worked. Despite apparently being made by the same person, that person clearly didn’t know anything about proper use of narrative. Which was clear with the way everyone else shrouded themselves in their own torn narratives, but _still_ there were _limits_ and whoever this Carmilla was she clearly hadn’t known them.

The first time they found she could sing and play an instrument Raphaella had had to delve herself into analysis of stories to keep from crying and answer like someone who hadn’t been denied a flock to sing with for centuries. They didn’t have wings, they couldn’t know, she hadn’t told them, and. Well. It took her a while, to stop needing to rely on an old crutch of narrative analysis. It took her a wing, to stop infusing all of her singing with the joy of finding a flock. She managed. She didn’t need to make a flock, at the end of the story. She had the proverbial pot of gold, and she wasn’t going to let go. She was going to sing with them until the narrative said that it was their time to pass beyond to rest.

**Author's Note:**

> do not @ me I think terry pratchett's witches having a narrative sense is amazing and i love the concept of raph being one but also only using it for science  
> and accidentally giving herself trauma and refusing to admit that that's what she's done. it's spicy memories™


End file.
